Sunday, March 15, 2009

I have to report two aesthetic experiences of note from my Highland Jaunt - I am omitting the landscape and my new tweed waistcoat. The first was watching The Big Lebowski yet again, hence the headline on my previous post. The second was finishing The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. Nige has been urging me to read Roth for years. He was right do so. This is a masterpiece, one scene after another dazzles, dismays and inspires. From the early moment when the newly ennobled son appears in the full glory of his imperial uniform before his peasant father - 'in the alien and almost unearthly radiance of imperial favour as in a golden cloud' - to the delivery of the news of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo to an absurd, drunken, army festival - 'a lone sentence made up of huge and very distinct words scrawled in blue pencil' - it is a story of delusion and failure that becomes, through some mighty act of the imagination, curiously consoling. Read it at once.

Excellent - Lebowski could even be a character from Roth. I first came across him when working with Polish agency workers, most of whom were highly qualified in Posnan or Lodz, but were now picking vegetables or working as hotel receptionists. You yearn for that lost ruritanian world, aware of the horrors to come. May I also recommend Czesław Miłosz, a more modern central european and a formidable intellect? Clever folks, those Poles.

i think my favourite line is John Goodman's summary of the black-clad Kraut nihilists who threaten to castrate the Dude:

"Fucking Germans. Nothing changes. Fucking Nazis."

Which is almost as good as the line he uses to menace a sullen kid: "Have you ever heard of Vietnam?" - on paper it doesn't look that great, but Goodman's edge-of-psychosis delivery really makes it special.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.